One reason concrete repair contractors use Rapid Set® products is that the very-early-strength cements, concretes, and mortars help win business from general contractors who are behind schedule.
That’s just what happened with Innovative Concrete Solutions of Ovilla, Texas, after using Cement All® Plus to re-slope a factory floor. By the time the crew left IKO Metals’ manufacturing plant in Ennis, Texas, they’d made up for more than two weeks of lost time – and Innovative Concrete Solutions owner Bob Lucius had earned more business from a new general contractor client.
Lucius was called in by a contact with whom he’d subcontracted in the past and was now working for Baseline Construction, the general contractor on the project. The metal roofing manufacturer was repurposing industrial property into its third U.S. facility.
This required sloping the concrete floor toward drains around four rectangular sections of the slab to collect rinse water from an elevated conveyor line. The sections varied in size, but were roughly 80 feet long and 16 to 20 feet wide.
After a concrete contractor created the hip roof-like design in each section, Innovative Concrete Solutions was contracted to epoxy them. However, Lucius noticed as he and the project manager walked the jobsite that those areas flexed under their weight.
“I stuck my pocketknife in a hairline crack and popped out a 2-inch square of the material. Then I got some golf balls from my truck and started bouncing them over the surface,” he says. “Maybe 5% was still bonded. And I said, ‘I'm sorry; this material will fail as the epoxy contracts during curing, and I can’t warranty our work.’”
The sections had been sloped with a portland cement-based, two-component repair material that requires adding liquid polymer to repair material powder in precise dosages. Durability can be greatly compromised if mix ratios are off even slightly or the polymer bonding agent isn’t properly applied. In this case, Baseline Construction was able to push the material off with a skid steer loader bucket.
By this time, the general contractor was about two weeks behind schedule and had spent tens of thousands of dollars on wasted material. Having used calcium sulfoaluminate (CSA) cement-based Rapid Set® products for almost two decades in decorative as well as repair applications, Lucius knew his crew could deliver durable re-sloped sections in less than a week.
When Lucius reached out to Rapid Set® producer CTS Cement Manufacturing Corp. for a product recommendation for this particular application, field representative Moises Amparan suggested Cement All® Plus.
Innovative Concrete Solutions had used Cement All®, a multipurpose repair material that can be applied from featheredge to 4 inches thick, so the crew knew the product. Self-curing Cement All® Plus also can be applied from featheredge to 4 inches thick, but is formulated to a concrete gray color and has a longer working time.
“Even better!” thought Lucius. “I knew it would work.”
And it did.
An Assembly Line Repair Process for a Factory Floor
Cement All® Plus is a single-component repair material; only water is required for the mix to achieve 4000 psi (27.6 MPa) compressive strength in 3 hours. No bonding agent is required.
“We scuffed up the surface with 6-grit diamond tooling and cleaned it up, then started in the middle at ½-inch and sloped to featheredge on the sides,” Lucius says. “The crew placed and screeded the south side of one section, then placed and screeded the south side of the next section, then the third and fourth sections. When we came back the next day those portions had cured and we’d do the other sides.”
“It worked out really well thanks to the material’s excellent leveling properties. In fact, the GC was amazed that after prepping our little four-man crew took three days to replace 400-some-odd bags of repair material. Two days later, we came back and lightly ground the placements to prepare for the epoxy coating. We’ve done a couple more projects for them since then.”
Cement All® Plus may be mixed using 3.25 to 4.25 quarts (3 L to 4 L) of water per 55-pound (25-kg) bag. “We made the mix a little bit wet but not crazy wet,” Lucius says. With temperatures inside the building hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the crew used ice-cold mix water and added Rapid Set® SET Control retarding admixture to the mix.
Innovative Concrete Solutions has developed a glass fiber-reinforced concrete (GFRC) mix design using Rapid Set® Cement to customize countertops, fireplace mantels, staircases, and other decorative concrete applications. But that’s a story for another day. In the meantime, Lucius is considering using Cement All® Plus to slope cooler room floors for a fish distributor.
